Direct Mail

I've been out at a business networking event today, and along with a colleague of mine, gave a presentation on cost effective marketing, using your database. Because at the moment results are important and we want to get the best return from any marketing we do.

The interesting thing about database marketing is that if you have a list of contacts (past customers, current customers, prospects) you've got a few choices on what you can do with it. Direct Mail, Email marketing or telesales are the 3 most likely ways that you can use your contact list to good effect. Direct Mail for a long time has been frowned upon because of the whole "junk mail" image. But now here do you see most "junk mail"? Yes, in your Email Inbox.

So while good Email marketing works very well (and it really does), a good direct mail shot will also now get you better results than ever because there's less out there so it's easier to stand out!

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk

A Really Quick Marketing Plan

I'm fortunate to know and work with other people in marketing but it always takes me by surprise when I'm reminded of something simple that I had either forgotten or perhaps not thought of before.

A case in point, when a marketing associate of mine, who these days is also a well known marketing speaker (www.geofframm.com) came to my area recently to present at a local business network. I always enjoy listening to Geoff and every time I see him I'm reminded of one of those gems. This time he had a great tip for marketing planning.

Marketing Plans are what we do best of course, so I'm always interested! But this tip is a such an easy way to get started...

Buy yourself a wall planner, a pack of felt tip pens and some gold stars. On the planner, choose different coloured pens for different areas of your marketing. Red for PR, green for events etc. and put the relevant marketing activity against specific dates. Use the gold stars every time you win some business and add them to the date that you won it. An excellent way to motivate the team and an easy way to follow a plan.

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk

Poor Marketing Amex!

I know that times are hard and we've got to be ever more creative to stay in business and more to the point, continue to make money. But, there's the right way to increase your marketing and the wrong way.

I don't usually point fingers but this one really got to me: American Express.

I've got an Amex card which I diligently pay off each month and so for me, it works very well. I can earn cash back at the end of each year for the money I spend, so I think I've got a good deal. Then a couple of weeks ago I got a survey from American Express, asking what I was interested in, what I used the card for etc. Now, being a marketer I thought well, why not, I know how valuable customer feedback is. So I filled it in and posted it back.

Then I got a promotion through the post from them, offering me the chance to be awarded two lots of £15.00 John Lewis vouchers over two months.... provided I spent a certain amount of money on the card, both of those months. This would have "delighted" me if it had been what I normally spent, or lower, but no. They wanted me to spend around £3-£400 MORE than I would normally spend in any month. If I didn't, I wasn't entitled to to the vouchers.

How to get it so wrong!! I had told them that I liked to shop in John Lewis so that was relevant. But considering the uncertain economy at the moment, did they really think I'd willingly "up" my credit card spending to win a measly £30 of vouchers? No way. So now I'm annoyed with them and what a lost oportunity for them to win me over and stay loyal!!

Hrrmph.

Anyobody know of a good cashback credit card that will take me seriously? Have you got a worse story? Let us know if you have and we'll tell everyone!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Reviews are King

There's yet another growing trend on the internet which is definitely making websites more popular and sort of makes more sense of "Web 2.0" for me. I knew that Web 2.0 was all about interacting and that websites these days had to do more of that, but short of being tolerant of social networking sites (as I get them now, but still find it easier to pick up the phone) I couldn't work out what all the fuss was about.

Then I discovered that more and more shopping sites are inviting comments or reviews on what people buy from them. You've probably seen it on Amazon but now you'll find customer reviews on all sorts of websites from clothes (Boden, M & S) through to electrical retailers such as Comet. Dodgy stuff you would think, given that presumably customers can slate your product just as soon as rave about it. But, in fact it works. Most people just give a fair assessment of what they thought and guess what? New customers trust this more than anything they read by the retailer and feel more inclined to buy as a result.

There's another new thing to add to my list of marketing things to think about...

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk

Are our E-communications working?

Having written last time on how great e-communications are, you know e-newsletters and pretty emails that land in your inbox? Then I thought that not all of them are good. It's easy for me to say as a marketing bod that this stuff is great because it saves us so much time and it's just so clever (for easily excited people like me anyway) but I get REALLY wound up with people sending me repeated emails that are (a) too full of text to inspire me to do anything but lie down and (b) they won't let me unsubscribe.

So is that really right - upset your customers (or random people whose email you happen to have) so much that they're driven to ranting on the phone - or worse in a blog? My thought today was that for every one customer that you upset they'll tell 20 other people.... imagine how the internet expands that millions of times!

I suppose in that case it's what goes around comes around. It doesn't put me off and it shouldn't put you off if you're a marketer as long as you do it right. The law (data protection) currently says that means that if they're a recent customer that's fair enough and if they've signed up (subscribed) that's fine, which if you think about covers quite a lot of people really.

Karen McNulty
MarketingPlanWiz

E-newsletters

I wasn't sure about email newsletters at first as heaven knows there's enough stuff landing in our inboxes every day. But as with all marketing, if it's done well it works. I've noticed that the ones I do read aren't too long, are very clear with enough small (we don't want it to take an hour to appear) graphics to break up the text and MOST importantly I can get what I want from it in no more than five minutes, preferably two.

So I suppose it's back to design basics and good copy (see previous blog).

Then you need to send it properly - don't send it from your Outlook or usual email software - use a purpose built e-newsletter system such as constant contact (www.constantcontact.com) which has several major advantages over the DIY method:

1. Good providers use an obvious "unsubscribe" option so that your recipients can unsubscribe quickly and easily
2. They also send the emails on your behalf so that you avoid spam filters knocking you back (they manage this for you) and they look professional
3. You can track how many people opened it, what they looked at, how many times they read it and you'll know if they "bounce" or don't get delivered.

You can't do any of that effectively from your usual email software, so although there is a cost (usually around £10-£20 per month, depending on the number of people you mail to, it's not expensive in my opinion) the results are far better.

We use Constant Contact but perhaps you know of other good ones? Let us know if you do, more choice is always good.

Karen McNulty
MarketingPlanWiz

Good Copywriting

I felt compelled to talk about this today as I saw a really interesting talk by a copywriting expert last night (Richard Groom from the Peterborough Copywriting Bureau). I think I'm fortunate in that as a Marketer, I like meeting other people in Marketing and always think I'll learn something new - we never know everything do we?

So listening to some excellent tips on getting your copy right, whether it's for brochures, websites, press articles or even your blog (no comments please) did refresh my view on the subject and remind me of the basics, which are....

• Keep it simple - don't use 42 words in one sentence and keep it in plain English!
• Think about your target audience before you even think about writing - this has a bearing on the whole style of your copy, logical really but easily forgotten
• Write from your customer's view point. What is is that they need, what are their issues that you might solve with your product or service? Addressing these first means that your reader will engage with what you're saying immediately.
  

I could go on, and frequently do, but I think that's a nice number of things to remember and pretty much covers it. So, keeping it simple I'm off to write some stuff for my own website now with a nice clear head.

Happy Marketing!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Selling isn't so Bad

I get all flustered when think about "selling". Why? It conjures up pictures of slimy door to door salesmen (or women but the slimy ones tend to be male for some reason) or exasperating telesales people which make me instantly switch off. My brain knows that selling is an important part of the marketing mix but the rest of me hasn't caught up yet.

Then I went to a business networking event last week where I go to "meet an expert" in sales. It was one of those moments where I thought "run now" and was about to go on the hunt for the marketing expert instead (well there's always something you can learn) when the door was closed and we were "speed experting". That meant we had 15 minutes with each expert and then got moved onto the next one.

Well I definitely learned something (with each of them as it happens, including the health and safety chap) - and forced to come up with a sales question I put my mind to what I needed to know. "Face to face selling" I asked - "how do I do it as a service business?". Oddly this is something that terrifies me despite the fact that I love meeting people and networking. And this ultimately was the point - he said that I shouldn't think of it as selling and that it's all about relationships at the end of the day. Also to only go with one objective in mind the first time you want to make contact - if that's just getting the right name, leave it at that and go back next time to set up the meeting or make the telephone call.

Very obvious I know but so much less scary. So fired up (as I run my own marketing business too) I made myself a small list of the people I really wanted to make contact with and one step at a time I think I'm going to do it...

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Back to Marketing Basics

Do you find that you get so caught up in the new stuff sometimes that you forget the basics? I've spent a lot of time in the past year focusing on "internet marketing" and get very animated about it when given the opportunity (so much so that people are getting wary of letting me get onto the subject these days). I still think it's amazing and love that fact that I can measure practically everything online in a way that you just can't with traditional marketing. I reckon I'll soon be able to find out what my customers had for breakfast as well as how many times they visited our website, although I'm not sure that's terribly useful.

I'll get back to the point - see it happens every time... In spite of all of the above, we recently got the chance to sponsor a local business event in the East Midlands. This was excellent - a fab networking opportunity too and you know how much we go on about that. As the event got closer I thought I ought to get organised and prepared a short set of slides with some big screen-shots of MarketingPlanWiz - well it is an online service so that made sense. Then I had to think about what I could leave on people's tables (it was a sit-down dinner).

I know this should be obvious to somebody who's supposed to know about marketing but I had to think. I'd been so used to promoting us with pay per click advertising, SEO, linking and the like that we didn't have any "stuff" to leave on a table! So back to what I (used to) know best and on with producing a leaflet - a memorable one of course that stood out from all of the other leaflets. Do you know it was really nice to go back to good old design and print? It's still good to have something you can get hold of, wave about and feel (is it only me that does that with literature?) and read it without peering at a computer screen. And heaven knows we spend enough time staring at people's websites and googling.

I'm happy now!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

The Silver Lining

Following on from my comments about thinking laterally last week, I've had one of those weeks where it doesn't matter how good you think your planning is - it just doesn't work out. That's really annoying but we've discovered that those are the best moments because there's often another opportunity that you were meant to go for instead. There's always a reason and that's the law according to Karen and Fay. Well otherwise it would be depressing.

So from a business point of view how do you deal with a complete change of direction? If you've put together your business or marketing plan for the year you're hopefully using it - this is the moment to re-visit it and think backwards. Sometimes we get so single minded about following a particular track we forget what we were aiming for and that there's usually more than one way to get there. Fay and I do this regularly with food if possible (I'd like to add "and a glass of wine" at this point but unfortunately it tends to be coffee) or over Skype (not usually with food). We remind each other what it is we're trying to achieve and once we've got past holidays/new car/MORE SHOPPING (sorry Fay but it is really important), we invariably come up with a new idea for promoting our products. It's easy to add this back into our plan with a quick tweak and it's good to look again in any case as we always think of something else.

Anyway, this week we had to change our plan and now we feel better, hence the silver lining.

Karen McNulty
MarketingPlanWiz

Creative Marketing?

Speaking to some friends recently I was advised that blogging with a glass of wine might not be a bad idea. I'm not sure if this means my blogging is really bad when I'm sober or whether it might just need to be more relaxed generally. I'm sure I've said before that blogging doesn't come naturally to most marketers - we're far too used to writing perfect copy, proof-reading it and getting everything "signed off". Doing it in this easy way just feels dangerous!

Simon, our website developer, finds my blogging frustration particularly amusing - "don't worry" he says, "you'll find your mojo". I'm still not sure what a mojo is or where I'll find it, but clearly he wants me to chill out too.

So I started thinking (in a very long winded way, sorry) that taking a different approach is also good for our marketing. I've just written an article for our monthly newsletter on money saving tips for marketing and the message is the same - start being a bit more creative and you'll be amazed at what you can do. We particularly like the simple ones such as changing the shape of your sales literature or sticking your website address on a big poster in the back window of your car - very simple but quite effective.

So my next blog will be with wine (I promise Simon) and the next time Fay and I meet to discuss our business - we're doing it in the pub!

You can get a copy of our newsletter (Wiz e-articles) by signing up on our home page.

Cheers...

Karen McNulty

Ignore Social Networking at your Peril!

It's no good. I've discovered that no matter how much it goes against the grain, social networking is here to stay, and what's more it's good for business. Having spent the past year resisting these networks, reluctant to tell all about anything out there on the world wide web (well it's so public!) I've none the less felt obliged to learn more about them as a marketer. Well I can't miss any opportunities and besides it's fascinating to see how marketing online is changing.

So armed with lists of sites to look at, I've been trawling through them and learned that some are seriously scary until you master privacy settings and they're definitely aimed at different audiences. Facebook for example is increasingly used by businesses to raise awareness whilst Bebo is considered a "younger" network. I'm a fan of Linked In too, which is very much a business network.

Then there's social bookmarking, where you you can bookmark a website for other people to see. These also often allow "comments" like blogs do and the whole shared bookmarking thing is essentially about voting for your favourite websites. Then if enough users vote for a particular site it will appear in a "hot" list of the social bookmarking sites for its category.

All very clever and you can see how word starts to spread and of course more links are made to the original website that was bookmarked. There is, I discovered, a handy "add" tool which you can code into your website pages if you want to make it easy for people to bookmark your content. Have a look at www.addthis.com which provides an all-in-one button, very useful. Now we're looking at our online Marketing Plan Builder to add more of these options - internet marketing has become a much bigger part of the marketing mix and social networking justifiably counts as an important part of online marketing strategy.

Happy socialising!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

PR Goes Online Too

PR (public relations) has moved on aswell. Having spent years drafting press releases and making friends with news and features editors at various local newspapers, it's mind-blowing to think that at the push of a button you can now get your releases on the web. Of course this means potentially very large numbers of people can see your news and if you're luck they'll pass it on too.

Bloggers like to trawl for good news items and if you write your release with the web in mind it could really have legs! I'm happy to report that the basic rules of writing new releases stays the same. You need a good headline, relevant first paragraph that sums up the story (in case your item gets cut short) and written well in clear language, with no spelling errors. Most journalists (on the web or in the more traditional media) are happier if they can cut and paste your text so bear this in mind.

The only other things to remember for the web are:

• Remember your keywords and make sure they're used in your text for optimisation purposes
  
• Add in your website address if you haven't already so that they can link back to your business website and any other links that make your article more interesting
  
• Don't use html, you must write in plain text to avoid potential formatting problems.

Where can you send your press releases online?

Many of these services aren't free but there are free elements to most of them. Here are a few to look at:

www.prweb.com
www.pr.com
www.pressbox.co.uk
www.prleap.com

Happy Marketing!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Affiliate Marketing

We've just sent out our monthly newsletter (wiz e-articles, you can sign up here www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk ) where we've been talking about producing an Internet marketing plan for your business. When we were looking at promotion we listed the (now) usual internet marketing techniques such as blogs, podcasts, linking and so on, adding "affiliate marketing" as another item. Affiliate marketing is where somebody sells your product for you via their website and they receive an agreed commission to do so. The other way around as an affiliate you can work with a third party to add a link on your website and receive that commission. Popular affiliate schemes are run by Amazon and Ebay for example.

This got me thinking that it's so easy to name lots of different ways to reach your customers using the Internet today as we're so much more used to it, but what I forget is how powerful some of these methods can be.

Affiliate marketing I recently discovered (thanks to a really switched on chap called John Kirk whilst on a training course to top up my internet marketing skills) can be one of those powerful tools. I had previously thought of it in the context of an affiliate, wondering if it works and could you ever really get a good return? I realised that I should have been looking at from the other point of view, which is that ultimately it does two really important things...1. Drives traffic to your website and 2. As you only pay commission when you've made a sale you're not spending money up front, just a percentage of your sale proceeds. It actually is an incredibly low risk method of increasing visitors and sales!

Why not think about developing your own internet marketing plan, can affiliate marketing work for your business?

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk

Linking Basics

I've been a bit more tuned into "linking" recently (when somebody else's website links to yours) and how it can help our business - from a marketing point of view of course.

Some things are so obvious you wonder how you miss them but in case you're like me and walk round with your eyes shut sometimes, here are some of the main ones. Who links to you now? That's a useful starting point and although obvious saves you time trying to target people who have already found you. Then who links to your competitors? This is brilliant! There's your ready made list of people to target for your website, (so long as they're relevant). That saves some legwork and if your competitor has been around for a while you'll have a really good quality list.

Another way to do this if your competitors aren't lurking at the front of your mind, is to type your search terms into Google and see who comes up. Then check to see who's linking to them.

There are a couple of really good sites you can use to check links: www.linkpopularity.com, or Yahoo by typing in: Linkdomain:url.com into the search box on Yahoo's home page, this shows you all of the pages that link to your website. This is quite good fun (well it is if you're easily pleased) as you're often surprised at new links that have appeared.

When you're putting together a marketing plan, linking should now be a key part of your strategy if you have a website. It's critical if you trade online as it ultimately drives more traffic to you.

So, happy link hunting!

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk

Planning a website

I know I've got to produce a marketing plan if I want my marketing to work and that I'll be asked for a business plan by the Bank Manager when I need a loan.   We threw together a list of bullet points and general guidelines when we started the marketingplanwiz website but they were brief (we didn't think so at the time I have to say) because we'd written all the rest of our plans in the "business plan" that we'd laboured over and were justly proud of.

I was reminded today that producing a proper plan for a website is important.  Not just what we ask the web designer to put together (as we tend to think of our websites as a just another promotional tool) but the real purpose of building the site in the first place.  Of course we know it should look the same as our other marketing materials and show our products and services, "contact us" and the rest. Then we end up spending a lot of time building the site with ideas for navigation, functionality and "look and feel" (feeling very pleased with ourselves for remembering all of this), completely forgetting in the process that we haven't worked out the objectives of the site (is it for information or do you want people to buy?), how it will display our branding values? Who is the target audience?

I always think I know these things of course (I'm a marketer so I'm supposed to let's face it) so off I go and ask somebody to make a website somehow imagining that they'll be on my wavelength and just do it right.   Obviously they don't so it's back to square one - planning.  

Karen McNulty

MarketingPlanWiz

Welcome back to our marketing blog! 

This week I've been thinking about SEO - having just been learning more about it.  It's absolutely fascinating because there are so many basics that you have to get right before your website can get even a chance of being picked up by search engines such as  Google.  Did you know for example that your "Title Tag" (the heading that appears at the top of your browser once your website has loaded) is absolutely critical, but so many of us forget about it!  This is where you get the chance in a sentence to say exactly what your website does... so if you sell flower pots and your company is called Smith and Co., don't have "Smith and Co. as your Title tag - say something like "Flower pots, all sizes and made to order" then search engines can immediately see what you do.  Of course if you're like me and haven't a clue how to make your website do that, you need to ask your lovely website designer to add it for you.  It's apparently not difficult - but that's easy for me to say...

The other thing I discovered is a website (www.ranks.nl) that tells you if you've got your "keyword density" right (sounds uncomfortable).  This is getting just the right number of keyword phrases on any page of your website.   Too few and the search engines won't be able to match you to relevant searches, too many and you've "over-egged" it.  The golden rule is 3 - 5% of your text should contain keyword phrases.  So if you had 100 words on a page, there should be no more than 5 mentions.

See, simple really! 

Karen McNulty

MarketingPlanWiz